by Brian Leiter
On his web site, Professor Finkelstein has posted a very fine letter by a philosopher in the U.K. sent to the President of DePaul University, Dennis Holtschneider (you may e-mail President Holtschneider here regarding the tenure case). The letter writer notes a point we have touched on in the past, namely, the misuse of the term "ad hominem" to describe certain kinds of criticism. Our U.K. philosopher wrote, in pertinent part, as follows:
I write to you as a retired teacher of Philosophy, formerly a lecturer in the University of Wales, and a founding member of the Council for Academic Freedom and Academic Standards, to express my dismay at your decision to refuse tenure to Norman Finkelstein and to dismiss him.
In defending your position, you refer more than once in your letter to him to ‘ad hominem attacks’ he has made upon other scholars, thus endorsing the complaint made publicly against him by Alan Dershowitz.
As I’m sure I don’t need to point out to you, ‘ad hominem’ refers to the fallacy of inferring the falsity of a statement from the bad character of the individual making it. But I’m not sure if you and Dershowitz understand the term in its technical sense. The implication of your use of the logician’s term of art is that Finkelstein is guilty of a scholarly offence: but I doubt that you could point to an instance of it in his writings. To the contrary, Finkelstein draws adverse conclusions about an individual’s character from the falsity of what he or she says, a perfectly reasonable procedure (where the falsity can’t be put down to innocent error). In drawing such conclusions Finkelstein is hardly guilty, as you suggest, of not being ‘objective’ in his ‘professional judgement of colleagues’, unless you think that objectivity is the same as neutrality. Nor can you think that he fails to show ‘due respect for the opinions of others’ unless you hold the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect.
No one, of course, actually holds "the absurd view that all opinions are worthy of respect." But many people, unsurprisingly, hold the view that their absurd "opinions are worthy of respect," which is almost always what is at issue when careless accusations of "ad hominem" attacks are bandied about.
UPDATE: It might be worth noting that the Illinois Chapter of the AAUP has now entered the fray, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education:
On Friday the Illinois Conference of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter to the university’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider....In the two-page letter, Leo Welch, the chapter’s president, says the decision to deny tenure to the two assistant professors violated both the association’s standards and those of DePaul’s own Faculty Handbook.
Mr. Finkelstein’s alleged lack of “collegiality” appears to have been the “sole basis” for denying him tenure, Mr. Welch writes. “It is entirely illegitimate for a university to deny tenure to a professor out of fear that his published research … might hurt a college’s reputation,” he says. The association has explicitly rejected collegiality as an appropriate criterion for evaluating faculty members, and has criticized it as “ensuring homogeneity” and undermining the leadership role of colleges and universities, according to the letter.
4 comments:
Dear Mr. Finkelstein,
Mr. Finkelstein professes to be a proponent of free and unrestricted speech. Why hasn't he linked to the Chicago Sun-Times article and the minority report from the DePaul tenure committee about his alleged sexism? Why did he selectively leak only the majority report? How can his readers accurately gauge the wisdom of DePaul's decision to deny him tenure without all of the available information?
We, his readers, are left to conclude that the reasons provided in the report are accurate reasons for his denial of tenure.
Sincerely,
Charles Johnson
http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1116. Directly from his website.
He has nothing to hide. He far exceeded the qualifications for tenure, and we've seen there aren't any sufficient reasons, or even evidence to back up those reasons, to deny him tenure. The claims made against Finkelstein's case are almost laughable, and the motivations behind his denial are pretty transparent for anyone who followed the process.
Thank you for your inquiry regarding the minority report. The fact is that no one really knows how the minority report was leaked out, though faculty in the Political Science dept were expressly forbidden from distributing it. Nontenured faculty in the dept despite being in the personnel committee have also not seen it. It is under very tight wraps. The truth is I have never read a copy myself and am very eager to read the whole thing. While the Sun Times may have a copy, we don't.
You are right, there are no ways to accurately gauge the reliability of the decision, we have not been given the chance to see the minority report! From faculty that have told me they know the minority report, they said that President Holtschneider's letter to Finkelstein almost exclusively cited from the minority report. Of course there is no way to know because we have nothing to compare to.
I talked with a different senior faculty, and there is a rebuttal written by the majority in response to the minority report, which was handed to the Dean and the President but was not put in the file. The reason? Because the rebuttal was not delivered by Finkelstein himself, but the senior faculty who helped write it.
At this time, we are left to conclude that provided in the report are only a part of the real story - we are not allowed access to the minority report.
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
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